InterMine Mobile

Tag: Events

BOSC (the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference) is normally part of ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology), but for the first time this year, it teamed up with The Galaxy Community Conference (GCC) instead. For us, this presented an exciting opportunity – like a regular BOSC but with the added bonus of training days and the chance to interact with Galaxy contributors during the CollaborationFest hackathon (and the rest of the conference too).

While we did recommend to people that they try to install the InterMine Python client, we also managed to work around the issue for anyone who didn’t have things installed, thanks to binder. You can still see the tutorial exercise notebooks and work through them, and we have the same set of notebooks with answers if you get stuck or need a hint. This was the first time we worked through the exercises interactively onscreen this way, but it seemed to work well! I’m hopeful we can continue providing the API portion of our tutorial this way in the future.

We had planned to do an R section, but actually ran out of time to do this – the tutorial was about two and a half hours in total. If an R tutorial is something of interest in the future though, please do let us know! You can do this via comments on this article, twitter, pop by chat.intermine.org, or email us at info – at – intermine – dot – org.

InterMine 2.0: More than fifteen years of open biological data integration

[Slides link] We were very pleased to have a talk accepted as well as the training, giving us a chance to introduce InterMine to others and talk about its history. While I was talking I mentioned that we were ranking at just under 300 stars on our main GitHub repo, and the audience kindly help bump it up and over 300!

One of the topics I focused on during the talk included a massive thanks to all of the work our broader community does to help keep InterMine become and remain a great resource. Afterwards, Lorena Pantano raised the question: how do you get others to adopt your work and contribute to it?

Personally, I’ve been working at InterMine for three years now, so I certainly can’t attest to the entirely of the history – much of this is doubtless down to the team’s great work and Gos’s great vision (and grant writing!) – but I also think one of the most important parts is probably down to making it easy for others to use your work: good developer docs, tickets that explain issues clearly, help documentation for end-users, etc. I’d love to hear more thoughts about this in the comments!

Birds of a Feather sessions

Daniela and Yo both ran separate Birds of a Feather unconference-style sessions over lunch. Yo’s BoF focused on getting (and keeping) more open source contributors – Nicole Vasilevsky was kind enough to keep notes for this session. Thanks, Nicole!

Meanwhile Daniela shared the InterMine approach to implement stable and persistent URIs and the possible related issues, inspired by other data integrators and the lessons learnt in the Identifiers for the 21st century paper; some attendees have also contributed providing their own solutions.

Hackathon

Group meeting session at CoFest. Try to spot Daniela! 😉

During the CollaborationFest hackathon, Daniela and Yo were able to complete (yeahhhh!!) the integration between Galaxy and InterMine thanks to invaluable help of Daniel Blankenberg.
On the next Galaxy release, the new InterMine plugin will be available and will allow to import data (from InterMine) into Galaxy and export lists of identifiers (e.g. proteins, genes) from Galaxy (into InterMine) by selecting the mine instance from the InterMine registry. Watch this space – we’ll hopefully arrange to get some details on the Galaxy training network to explain how to run the data imports in each direction.

We recently added a public google calendar you can subscribe to if you’re interested in knowing what we’re up to, or when public holidays might mean we’re out of the office. Here’s a quick lowdown on upcoming events:

22-23 July 2017: I’ll be presenting a poster at BOSC/ISMB about BlueGenes, with the fantastically witty title “Forever in BlueGenes: a next-generation genomic data interface powered by InterMine”. 👖

If you’re a GSoC student or mentor, there will also be the evaluation periods at the end of each month, but you’re doubtless well aware of those!

Further in the future, you may find us at SWAT4LS, ISWC, and further Bioschemas events. We’ll keep you posted!

Are you attending any fun events? Let us know!

If you’re going to be at an event this year where you’ll be telling others about your work with InterMine and might like some InterMine stickers or handouts – or perhaps you’d like to guest-blog about it or share your slides – please ping us.

We were in London to attend GraphConnect, the annual conference organised by Neo4j.
It was fantastic to meet so many people around the world enthusiastic about graph databases, and a lot of people that, like us, are prototyping/exploring Neo4j as possible alternative to relational databases.

They have announced the release of Neo4j 3.2 which promises to bring a huge improvement in term of performance; the compiled Cypher runtime has improved the speed by ~300% for a subset of basic queries and the introduction of native label indexes has also improved the write speed.

They have also added the composite indexes (that InterMine uses a lot) and the use of indexes with the OR operator. We highlighted the problem months ago on stackoverflow and we were so surprised to see it fixed. We have to update our “What we didn’t like about Neo4j” list by removing 2 items. We’re really happy about that!

It was a pleasure to attend Jesus Barrasa’s talk on debunking some RDF versus property graph alternative facts. He demoed how a RDF resource does not necessarily have to live in a triple store but can also be stored in Neo4j. Here are part1 and part2 of “Neo4j is your RDF store”, a nice post where he describes his work in more detail.

Another nice tool they have implemented is the ETL tool to import data from a relational database into Neo4j by applying some simple rules.

The solution-based talks demonstrated how Neo4j is being used to solve complex, real world problems ranging from travel recommendation engines to measuring the impact of slot machine locations on casino floors. While the topics were diverse, a common theme across their respective architectures was the use of GraphAware’s plugins, some of which are free. One plugin that looks particularly interesting is the Neo4j2Elastic tool which transparently pushes data from Neo4j to ElasticSearch.

During the conference, we discovered that there is a Neo4j Startup Program that allows to have Neo4j enterprise edition for free. Not sure if we count as a start up though!

Overall, we’re super happy with the improvements Neo4j has made, and super impressed with Neo4j’s growing community. Looking forward to meeting with Neo4j team in London, at their meetup, and sharing our small experience with the community!

2017’s developer conference has been and gone; time to pay my dues in a blog post or two.

Day 0: Welcome dinner, 29 March 2017

The Cambridge InterMine arrived at Walnut Creek without a hitch, and after a jetlagged attempt at a night’s sleep we sat down to a mega-grant-writing session in the hotel lobby, fuelled by several pots of coffee and plates of nachos.

By 7PM, people had begun to gather in the lobby to head to the inaugural conference dinner at the delicious Walnut Creek Yacht Club. We had to change the venue quite late on in the game, meaning we decided to wander down the street to collect some of the InterMiners who had ended up at the original venue (sorry!!). By the end of the meal, most of the UK contingent was dead on their feet – 10pm California time worked out to be 6am according to our body clocks, so when Joe offered to give several of us a lift back to the hotel, it was impossible to decline.

Day 1: Workshop Intro

The day started with intros from our PI, Gos, and our host, David Goodstein.

Short community talks

Joel gave a great presentation about Doppelgangers in InterMine – that is, occasionally, depending on your data sets and config, you can end up with duplicate or strange / incomplete InterMine objects in your mine. He follows up with explanations of the root causes and mitigation methods – a great resource for any InterMiner who is working in data source integration!

Next up was Sam’s talk about his various beany mines, including CowpeaMine, which has only genetics data, rather than the more typical InterMine genomic data. He’s also implemented several custom data visualisations on gene report pages – check out the slides or mines for more details.

Vivek focused on some great cross-InterMine collaborations (slides here), including the technical challenges integrating JBrowse into InterMine, as well as a method to link to other InterMines using synteny rather than InterMine’s typical homology approach.

Joe has the privilege to run the biggest InterMine, covering (currently) 72 data sets on 69 organisms. Compared to most InterMines, this is massive! Unsurprisingly, this scale comes with a few hitches many of the other mines don’t encounter. Joe’s slides give a great overview of the problems you might encounter in a large-scale InterMine and their solutions.

Joe talks about how PhytoMine handles having multiple versions of the same genome – not something InterMine natively handles. pic.twitter.com/hL40IdGbih

Better Findablility (the F in FAIR) by registering InterMine resources with external registries

RDF generation / SPARQL querying

This was followed up by Daniela’s introduction to RDF and SPARQL, which provided a great basic intro to the two concepts in an easily-understood manner. I really loved these slides, and I reckon they’d be a good introduction for anyone interested in learning more about what RDF and SPARQL are, whether or not you’re interested in InterMine .

If so, who is involved? Developers, community members, curators, other?

Homologue or homolog? Who knew a simple “ue” could cause incompatibility problems? Most InterMine use the “ue” variation, with the exception of PhytoMine. An answer to this problem was presented in the “friendly mine” section of Vivek’s talk earlier in the day.

Another great output was Siddartha Basu’s gist on setting up InterMine – outlining some pain points and noting the good bits.

Most of us met up for dinner afterwards at Kevin’s Noodle House – highly recommended for meat eaters, less so for veggies.

This went well despite a server-room meltdown which conveniently timed itself for the morning of the same day (the training session was in the afternoon, so we thankfully had time to get the servers back up!).

In contrast to previous years, every single hand went up when we asked if the participants wrote code as part of their job. Next time, we will try to allow for a longer session on using InterMine web services, rather than the 15 minute slot we allocated this time!

Developer Workshop and Hackathon: 5 days in sunny California, spending time with InterMiners from around the world. Longer blog posts to follow, but in the meantime you can browse the agenda for links to slides from each session, or the storify summary of tweets.

Google Summer of Code: We’re participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) this year (previously) as a mentoring organisation. We had over 50 interested students and 30 distinct applications, many of which were simply brilliant. The deadline for students applying, naturally, was the day after the hackathon, making finding time to provide student feedback a challenge. Maybe there’s a reason to be grateful for jet-lag induced wakefulness at odd hours!

Grants: A tale of two grants… :

New application: We had a grant application deadline that was, once again, the day after the hackathon. Uh-oh! Feverish figure fixes, tentative typo tweaks and word-count winnowing was squeezed in at every opportunity.

Good news about an old application: Meanwhile, we got the news that we’d been fortunate enough to have our hard work pay off: a grant we’d applied for last year as part of the BBSRC BBR 2016 call was agreed to! Hint: the future of InterMine is looking very FAIR, possibly even SPARQLing. More details in a later post.